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All in all, this card from Sonnet does exactly what it said it would do, and at a reasonable price. My only complaint would be that I wish Sonnet (and other Mac-centric expansion card vendors) would offer a PCI SATA card with onboard hardware RAID for G4's.
It comes with two SATA ports, cables, screws, etc. I was looking for a PCI SATA card to upgrade my older G4 mdd Mac from IDE to SATA and this Sonnet card did the trick perfectly.
I used OS X's built-in software RAID feature to stripe the two new drives for faster performance, and everything has been rock solid since. I installed it in an open PCI slot on my mac, attached two new SATA drives, and OS X saw everything the first time, no drivers needed.
The Sonnet card showed up in system profiler just fine, and my two new SATA drives were staring at me from the desktop just as I expected. I see inexpensive PCI RAID cards all over the place for older Windows machines, but trying to find the same for older Macs is an ordeal.
I recommend it.
Took about 10 seconds to format it and i was up and running. $60 seemed a little high, but to be able to have SATA in a old PM G4, i think it's worth every penny. Very happy they included a molex to sata power adapter. Card installed with out a problem, plugged new drive into it and booted computer. OS X came up and asked me what i would like to do with the new drive. Haven't had any problems yet. But i've only had it running for about 4 hours total.
I'm so happy with the results i'm looking into placing another card into this mac. It is pushing two 640 GB sata drives in a mirror RAID using Carbon Copy Cloner running 10.4 tiger.
the first was a G4 dual 450 Mhz Gigabit Ethernet powermac and it pushed a single 500 GB Sata drive nicely as long as i had several 128 GB partitions on the desktop. i have had this card for 3 years in two machines.
The second machine this card has been in is a quicksilver 933 Mhz powermac that has native large drive support built in on the motherboard. It was a bit annoying, but manageable.
Sonnet and their associates helped me set it up. Each drive has a single huge partition and i managed to install everything without any tech support from anyone.
Sonnet is expensive but their support is world class and you don't even need to be the original owner to receive this.
Does what it's suppose to do. Adds more SATA interfaces for the system and works like a charm. No issues.
I have never had any issues with any of these cards in any Mac G4 from the 500mhz all the way to the last of the G4 MDD models and into the G5 PowerMacsI can tell you that chances are if you are purchasing this for a MDD Dual processor model you need to "downgrade" the firmware to a more compatible version. Having purchased and installed at least 20 or more of these for various G4 macs, I can say that this is a must have for every user who wants to use SATA.This card is actually just a re-branded Firmtek card has extremely good drivers and updates on firmware on the Firmtek page. It has been around since 2003/2004 and is a great sata controller card. The latest version shipped on these contains additions for the G5 models and may cause freezing after sleeping on the MDD Dual processor models without downgrading. However I have never had that happen, but the Firmtek support page clearly lists it as a known issue and provides links for the "downgrade firmware"I give this product 5/5 and recommend it to anyone who is looking to step-up there mac to SATA interfaces and the performance that comes with SATA.
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